Egypt of Glory and Shadows

Museum Pedagogy in the Anthropocene

Authors

• Riikka Hohti Oulun yliopisto/Helsingin yliopisto
• Riikka Haapalainen Taideyliopisto
• Noora El Harouny Aalto-yliopisto
• Jonna Halli Aalto-yliopisto
• Miina Kanko Aalto-yliopisto
• Melanie Orenius Aalto-yliopisto
• Saban Ramadani Aalto-yliopisto
• Säde Rinne
• Lumi Wiikari Aalto-yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33350/ka.111726

Keywords:

museum pedagogy, art education, Anthropocene, colonialism, atmosphere

Abstract

The Anthropocene, ”The age of Humans”, is not only an environmental crisis but also an ontological one, because it puts the (Western) humankind in need to radically redefine its self-understanding and cultural heritage. Museums have long been seen as custodians of cultural heritage. We ask how to enact museum pedagogies involving heritages that are more and more clearly understood as produced by colonial extraction and white Western privilege. This very inheritance has also created the societal and environmental crises of our era. The purpose of this collective assemblage is to examine the cultural inheritance of the Anthropocene, and to explore the potentials for anticolonial art pedagogy in museums. We are a group of art education students, researchers, and museum pedagogues. In our article, we describe a six-month learning and research project that took place in fall 2020 around the Egypt of Glory exhibition at the Amos Rex Art Museum. Our research coincided with the Covid-19 pandemic, which affected practices and created atmospheres of specific oddities, insecurities and sensitivities. We describe a process of critical inquiry, during which we moved from discursive critique towards a more-than-human approach: towards sensing and observing relations, feelings and atmospheres among the exhibition space, the exhibited objects, bodies, histories, and futures. Methodologically, our article presents the atmospheric approach as a method for posthumanist and critical museum research. This approach can both help researchers to become sensitized to the emotional event of the Anthropocene and to pay attention to more-than-human relationality. Pedagogically, we offer a closer analysis of selected pedagogical activities developed during the project, ones that reflect a new sense of responsibility.